Event and Ticketing Details
Dates & Times
Thursday 23 June
6:15 PM - 7:30 PM
In a post-conflict society, with a still fragile justice system, establishing respect for human rights is crucial to nation-building and for East Timor’s future. An estimated 10,000 civilians, including women and children, were imprisoned and often tortured during the period 1975 to 1999. The Living Memory Project, founded by renowned Australian journalist Jill Jolliffe in collaboration with ASEPPOL (the association of former political prisoners), is creating a video archive to preserve their stories for a new generation of Timorese and for the human rights record. This panel discussion, interspersed with screenings from the archive, will track the progress of the Living Memory Project and explore questions of memory, truth and justice.
The event will be chaired by Michael Williams, the Wheeler Centre’s head of programming, and will feature the following guests:
- Abel Guterres, Timor-Leste Ambassador to Australia
- Jill Jolliffe, author and director of the Living Memory Project
- Robert Connelly, director of the feature film Balibo
This event is presented in partnership with the Victorian Women’s Trust and is supported by the Victorian Multicultural Commission and private donors.
Featuring
Michael Williams
Michael Williams is the editor of The Monthly. He was previously the Artistic Director of Sydney Writers’ Festival. He has spent the past decade at the Wheeler Centre for Books, Writing and Ideas in Melbourne as its ...
Jill Jolliffe
Jill Jolliffe published her first book East Timor: Nationalism and Colonialism with University of Queensland Press in 1978, written on a Young Writers Fellowship from the Literature Board of the Australia Council. It remains a classic text on the subject
That same year she moved to Portugal to continue work in journalism, publishing with The Guardian, The Sunday Times, The Eastern Express, the BBC, The Age and The Christian Science Monitor among other media outlets. She specialised in Portugal and its ex-colonies and consistently pursued human rights themes.
In 1992, she directed her first television documentary, The Pandora Trail, exposing prostitution rackets in Europe and the enslavement of Portuguese, Spanish and Third World women.
In 1994, she journeyed through Indonesia to the East Timor mountains to seek out guerrilla leader Nino Konis Santana. Despite capture by the Indonesian military she successfully completed Blockade, a documentary shot behind Indonesian lines, shown on SBS’s Dateline in 1996. It has a cult following in independent East Timor.
In 1998, she won a Logie Award for the documentary Death in Balibo, as an associate producer with the ABC’s Foreign Correspondent and in 1999 returned to Australia after 21 years in Portugal.